Focus Stacking Video

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Focus Stacking from John W. Wall on Vimeo.

Lying awake in the middle of the night, taking a shower, walking to the bus stop, swimming laps at the pool -- all good times to mull things over and hatch half-baked ideas. Having worked on a focus-stacked Doug fir cone photo the other day, I was inspired during a late-night reverie to create a short video composed of the individual clips that go into making an image like that. 

As you'll see, no frame by itself has enough depth of field to show the whole subject. But if you combine all the clips, which is what focus-stacking is all about, you can present the whole subject from front to back. Focus-stacking lends you a little bit of the control of a painter working on canvas. It lets you choose, to a degree not possible in the old days (pre-2008?), where the point of sharp focus in your photo begins and ends.

Funny things happen during a focus stack that you don't notice when you're running one in the field. Little bugs crawl across the subject. You bump the camera more than you thought. You cast an accidental shadow. A tiny twig somehow bounces into the frame. In short, movement happens despite all the care you take. This is field photography, after all -- working by hand. There are affordable, precise machines that are probably invaluable when focus-stacking at very high magnification, but I don't want to get that automated. I like to keep a hand in the process. It's imperfect, but it keeps the magic alive, at least for me.

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